March 27, 2025

‘Time to harvest’: SCA chief John Kelly on LiSTNR’s rise to payback machine, ‘insatiable’ demand, and an opportunity that Meta and co. have missed

28 minutes

SCA has spent four years building its uber-app LiSTNR from idea to the fulcrum of its audio business. It’s got 2.25m logged-in users, knows their postcodes – handy ahead of the federal election – what they listen to and what they might want to hear next. Kelly says acquisition is no longer core focus – “we’ve got the base we wanted to get” – and SCA is moving to kill churn, now at a record low.

“We’re approaching 70 per cent retention per month,” says Kelly. “For every percentage point of reduction in churn, we are seeing about a half million dollar increase in revenues on platform on an annual basis.”

Personalisation and discovery are powering those churn reductions while boosting time spent listening, per Kelly.

Next he sees massive opportunity in regional markets to take that further – for SCA, its advertisers and other radio businesses. Kelly points to a streaming deal it struck with Victoria broadcaster ACE Radio as a template for a triple win.

Bringing the broadcaster’s streams into LiSTNR, says Kelly, gave ACE an incremental revenue stream while boosting inventory and audiences for SCA. “They've seen about a 30 per cent increase in their audience levels listening on LiSTNR,” per Kelly. “And with the introduction of ACE, we’ve seen about a 20 per cent increase in monthly listening on our platform, which is pretty incredible.”

Plus, SCA is driving those new audiences into its other programs and podcasts, meaning bigger numbers to sell, at higher CPMs.

“We'll be speaking to other broadcasters, and particularly the regional network groups, to see if we can provide that service to them,” says Kelly.

“We are the largest regional audio business in Australia. 73 per cent of the regional audience comes through either SCA-owned or represented – stations like ACE – so we've got great scale. We haven't yet tapped into that regional audience in a meaningful way. But that's the next opportunity for LiSTNR.

Plus, regional consumption levels per user outpace their metro counterparts – and Kelly thinks they are a chink in the global platforms’ armour.

“The big digital companies, the Metas, haven't played in that regional space. So our ability to work with major blue chip companies to actually access those particular customers – the appetite is insatiable. We can't get enough inventory from those regional markets, which is why the ACE partnership has been so successful. There's a huge opportunity.”

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